“I [Merlin] have to live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind. Some people call it having second sight.” — T. H. White
Karen didn’t have a near-death experience. She had what she calls a “near-life experience.” While scrolling through life, Karen wasn’t thinking much about the quality of life or meaning. Then she lost her father.
As she waded through her grief, the realization that life ends hit her hard in the face. Amid a mountain of procrastination, avoidance, and screen time, she realized she wasn’t living. At least, she wasn’t engaging with life in a way that appreciated each day as an extraordinary opportunity to interact with what matters.
So, she wrote the book Your To-Die-For Life: How to Maximize Joy and Minimize Regret… Before Your Time Runs Out. It wasn’t her first book; she’s a bestselling author. Yet, this was the first she crafted that pointedly faced two of the most fearful things we humans face: death and what you should do between now and then.
A Life of Meaning
Karen discusses her near-life experience in this way: “I was on my phone too much, swiping. So, thereby, I wasn’t fully in my life. I was near my life, but I was life adjacent. I’d be out to dinner with a friend, and my mind might be elsewhere, I might be worrying about something in the future, or thinking about a regret or resentment. Again, I wasn’t fully in my life.”
Losing someone we love often creates a sort of divide—life before and life after. After losing her father, Karen discusses an in-your-face realization: “I woke up to the idea that death is real. Life is short. When someone you really love dies, it hits. You are here, and then you’re not. And it’s up to us to make that here part as meaningful as possible.” For Karen, much of this meant recognition of what she truly wished for.
She elaborates, “I have my dad’s death to thank for my son’s birth. After he died, I was really sad that my dad would never see me as a mom… in a weird way, my dad’s death snapped me out of saying someday I will have a baby, more than my biological clock.”
Of course, finding meaning in life does not always mean having children. Our relationships are often central. We are also continuously growing and changing. Upon recognizing that we may be nearing the end of life, people often describe an experience in which life flashes before their eyes.
Karen believes that this process can be intricate in making sense and finding purpose. According to Karen, “The end goal for life is to grow into the best possible version of yourself.”
Yet, this doesn’t have to be a culmination of feel-good experiences and emotions. Sometimes, what we find significance in doesn’t feel “good.” It can mean showing up for someone suffering or doing something painful that matters to us. She describes a common problem of people: “Confusing pleasure for happiness.”
Rather, Karen urges us to become “choosier choice choosers” by living life with intention.
Living Backwards
So, how do we do this? A common experiential in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is to ask someone what a close friend would say at their 100th birthday party if they had lived their life exactly as they wish (Luoma et al., 2007).
Karen echoes a similar thought of reverse engineering as we consider how we want to live.
In medicine, the concept of “quality of life” is rarely discussed outside palliative care. Karen feels that this discussion should begin as early as possible, sharing, “You shouldn’t wait until you have a near-death experience, the death of someone close to you, a health scare to start thinking about what makes for a meaningful life.”
Seeking guidance in this process is often necessary. We might reach out to a counselor, spiritual leader, family, or others as we explore what this means to us.
Karen speaks, “I’m not an end-of-life doula, I’m a middle-of-life doula. I think it’s a shame that we don’t have end-of-life doulas at the beginning of our lives, because why should we wait until the last minute to have peace, closure, and understanding of what matters? So, as a middle-of-life doula, I’m saying let’s do that end-of-life stuff now so that we have more runway to change our lives.”
Writing Your Eulogy
One exercise Karen recommends is writing a eulogy for yourself. In her book, there is a fill-in-the-blank eulogy exercise to help readers reflect on what they desire for their lives.
Karen elaborates, “After my dad died, I gave his eulogy, and I started thinking of this ritual of giving a eulogy. You sum up somebody’s life in like 500 words, and so I wrote my own eulogy. And I thought we had mission statements for businesses. Why don’t we have mission statements for our lives? We should be clearer about that.”
There is a recognition that eulogies reach out beyond any checklist. She shares, “What most eulogies are, they’re stories that have to do with a core value. Those are identity-based stories.”
Identity-Based Habits
Another strategy that Karen advocates for is “identity-based habits.”
Before this conversation, I had never heard of the idea. Karen expresses that it is a thought of who we need to become to live our lives to that aspirational eulogy. Such a journey is designed to spark what we value.
Identity-based habits mean considering what matters to us and making choices based on that. Karen states, “I am and so I do.”
Building our lives on our core values means much more than creating a list of life goals. In Karen’s words, “You can do everything on your to-do list and die unhappy because our to-do lists have a fatal flaw in that they worship productivity.” “I suggest that people create a to-die list, which is like creating a what matters most list.”
With identity-based habits and Karen’s “to-die list,” we aren’t talking about a list of activities like a bucket list. Rather, she discusses, “First you figure out what core values are important to you and then you choose habits.”
No Regrets
Beyond the popular tattoo, it’s not uncommon for someone at the end of their life to mourn things done and not done. In the book, there is an examination of common regrets of the dying and how we can create a plan now to avoid our regrets.
Authenticity is a major component of this. Karen expresses a journaling prompt of, “What do I need to know that I don’t want to know?” Such a reflective question is designed to peel away self-deception, a common catalyst to inauthenticity.
Closing
Meaning in life is an individualized construct. Yet, taking time to cultivate how we define this is well worth it. Your To-Die-For Life breaks this overwhelming process into manageable pieces.
